CHAPTER 1: "THE DAILY MIRACLE"
““Yes, he’s one of those men that don’t know how to manage. Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries as well as needs. Not really extravagant. And yet the fellow’s always in difficulties. Somehow he gets nothing out of his money. Excellent flat—half empty! Always looks as if he’d had the brokers in. New suit—old hat! Magnificent necktie—baggy trousers! Asks you to dinner: cut glass—bad mutton, or Turkish coffee—cracked cup! He can’t understand it. Explanation simply is that he fritters his income away. Wish I had the half of it! I’d show him—”
So we have most of us criticised, at one time or another, in our superior way.
We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer: it is the pride of the moment. Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on L85 a year. I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:—”This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money”! Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.
If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food? Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”?
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.”
-- Arnold Bennett, “
How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day
”, 1910
***
LIMIT BREAKS #1: TIME
Danger Flags
was on the darker end of the spectrum of what we tend to cover – whereas those concepts are important for understanding and navigating the world, I’m pleased that we’re going back to the well of practical productivity. Simple, straightforward, and effective doing better
and living better
.
Most of us will aim to have a “better life” and work towards it – the definition of “better” will vary from person to person, but almost all of us will work towards our conception of it.
As we look to improve and do more things, we run into various limits
to doing more.
It’s often tedious for a writer to go to the dictionary with a case they’re about to make, but I think it makes sense here. The Apple Dictionary’s definition of “limit” –
limit |
ˈ
limit|
noun
1 a point or level beyond which something does not or may not extend or pass: the limits of presidential power | the 10-minute limit on speeches | there was no limit to his imagination.
• (often limits) the terminal point or boundary of an area or movement: the city limits | the upper limit of the tidal reaches.
• the furthest extent of one's physical or mental endurance: Mary Ann tried everyone's patience to the limit | other horses were reaching their limit.
2 a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible: an age limit | a weight limit.
• a speed limit: a 30 mph limit.
• (in card games) an agreed maximum stake or bet.
• (also legal limit) the maximum concentration of alcohol in the blood that the law allows in the driver of a motor vehicle: the risk of drinkers inadvertently going over the limit.
3 Mathematics a point or value that a sequence, function, or sum of a series can be made to approach progressively, until it is as close to the point or value as desired.
verb (limits, limiting, limited) [with object]
set or serve as a limit to: try to limit the amount you drink | class sizes are limited to a maximum of 10 | (as adjective limiting) : a limiting factor.
Yes, there’s some useful fodder there:
*a point or level which something does not or may not extend or pass
*the furthest extent of one’s physical or mental endurance
*a restriction or amount of something permissible or possible
*the math definition (which we come to specifically in a future chapter)
*the verb, “try to limit the amount you drink”
What are the limits facing us on making a terrific life? How do we break through those limits? This is the crux of this series.
***
PROFOUND AND NEGLECTED TRUTH
Arnold Bennett’s “How To Live on 24 Hours Per Day” was a formative book for me to read.
It’s short – that’s the whole first chapter above – and the concept is rather simple on the surface.
“I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. […] You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. […] Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? […] We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.”
The simplest truths are often neglected. I read Bennett’s short book some 100 years after it was published, and it struck me right away. Yes, indeed – we shall never have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.
What should we do with it?
***
BACKDROP: THE PAX BRITANNICA
Arnold Bennett was born in 1867, wrote How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day
in 1910, and died in 1931.
He was one of the last of the Victorian British – meaning, he lived during the age of Queen Victoria.
Victoria herself was born in 1819 – four years after the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian General Blucher.
Victoria became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland in in 1837. She had already started to retreat from public life when Bennett was born in 1867, three decades into her reign.
These dates and people might seem irrelevant at first – why bother recounting them?
But I think it matters quite a lot: the current day-and-age, I believe, has more in common with the era that Bennett was born into than any other period of history.
After the fact, it came to be called the “Pax Britannica” – the “British Peace” – when Great Britain had clear and overwhelming superiority militarily, politically, and economically across the whole world.
The situation, I think, is similar to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The word political scientists use to describe a country with unrivaled superiority is “hegemony” – certain things typically happen during periods of hegemony like that which Rome held after the defeat of Carthage, that which the Mongols held during the Pax Mongolica
after conquering almost the entirety of the East, that which Great Britain held after Napoleon lit Europe on fire before being finally defeated, and the position America held after the fall of the Soviet Union.
War and strife tends to consume a lot of human energy, and certain forms of art and technology do not grow as well in times of war and strife than in times where there is a clear hegemon.
Much like our own, the Victorian Age had an extremely rapid growth of civilian technologies, communications, evolution of jobs and the nature of work, and interconnectedness and trade across the planet. It would not be an exaggeration to say that nearly every aspect of human life was transformed for people in the British Empire.
Bennett was one of the last of the Victorians, and you can see in his writings a mix of practicality and hopeful marching towards progress that comes from someone who had never faced existential threat and crisis. He was one of the last of the Victorians, living in an age of extremely rapid transformation, and his thinking can and should inform our own.
***
CHAPTER 2: “THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE’S PROGRAMME”
Bennett concluded Chapter 1, “We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.”
”
He begins Chapter 2,
““But,” someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything except the point, “what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day. I do all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper competitions. Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only twenty-four hours a day, to content one’s self with twenty-four hours a day!”
To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You are precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years. Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for telling me how you do it? Instead of me talking to you, you ought to be talking to me. Please come forward. That you exist, I am convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.
If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: “O man, what hast thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?” You may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself. True!
But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton.
It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook’s the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.
If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.”
***
CHAPTER 3: “PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING”
“Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have “more time”; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have “more time,” since you already have all the time there is—you expect me to let you into some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting, unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid of!
I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect that anyone else will ever find it. It is undiscovered. When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in your breast. Perhaps you said to yourself, “This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do.” Alas, no! The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all.
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too strongly insist on this.
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once. If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.
It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and sombre? And yet I think it is rather fine, too, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.
“Well,” you say, “assume that I am braced for the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how do I begin?” Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, “How do I begin to jump?” you would merely reply, “Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump.”
As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder.”
***
THE NATURE OF TIME
You can see why Bennett is so beloved – he’s got a wonderful sense of urging you forwards, combined with sympathy for the difficulty of the task at hand.
He’s also extremely quotable – “A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton.
”
“Never leaves Brixton” – indeed.
Anyone trying to do anything significant, sooner or later, realizes that time is one of the chief ingredients.
It’s obviously very important, but like anything else that is always there, we often don’t notice it – and perhaps, fail to think about it as much as we should.
What is
time?
I don’t want to get too philosophical; a lot of people have tackled the question throughout the ages.
But a few things are worth noting about time.
The first is that the Earth is spinning on its axis and is also orbiting around the Sun.
One full spin of the Earth on its axis is a “day” – the world around us is dark when we are facing away from the Sun (nighttime), and it is bright when we are facing the Sun (daytime).
That is a day.
A year – as we currently measure it – is one pass full orbit of the Earth around the Sun.
That is a year.
The division of the day into 24 hours is largely arbitrary – there have been other divisions of the day into different units, and they work just as well if not better. I’m particularly a fan of “
beat time
” which divides the day into 1000 units, and gets rid of timezones altogether while standardizing the world on “beats,” but that’s largely beyond the scope of this chapter. It’s just worth remembering than while a day is “real” – it’s a full set of movement that heat and sunshine wax and wane through – an “hour” is a made-up measurement. There are other potential measurements.
The week – seven days – is also somewhat arbitrary. At different times, people used different measurements for the passing of days. Most of this was standardized during the Roman Republic, early Roman Empire, and Christian Roman Empire, and it largely stuck because it was good enough; when the West industrialized first, these units of measurement were largely adopted across the world.
The human species – us – obviously, we evolved on Planet Earth. Thus, gradually our sleep/wake cycles and circadian rhythms came into some sort of harmony with the light and dark cycles of the world spinning.
Every day, you need to consume some basic materials – macronutrients, water, oxygen, etc – to stay alive. You do this throughout the days as the world spins around, and in the process your body ages. Gradually, through aging, your body loses the ability to replace damaged and decayed cells, and you die.
That might sound stark, but it’s just the facts of the matter. Even as the world spins on its axis, and orbits the Sun, similar movement is happening in your body. You heal and restore lost cells as you consume nutrients and raw materials, though your ability to heal and recover slows down over time, and then that’s the end of the game.
We might say, then, that time is a few things – but most importantly, it’s the human perception and measurement of movement large and small.
***
TIME AS THE FIRST, LAST, AND FUNDAMENTAL LIMIT
Bennett says that space has been explained, but time has not – I’m not sure either of those are true
.
Human bodies are constantly moving, in large and small ways. Blood is being pumped through your body, you breathe in air and process the oxygen, and then exhale; in short durations, you can heal and recover from most of your body wearing out; in the long run, you wear out and that’s it.
You can divide the movements of the Earth spinning and orbiting around the Sun into whatever measurements you want to – we use seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc – but the Earth spinning and orbiting is just a fact.
Movement is happening on large scales and small scales.
Most of what you’ll want to do on Planet Earth requires a mix of small and medium-sized movements from you; you do those movements and actions in time
, as the Earth and Sun do their thing.
In current technology, and for the foreseeable future, there’s no getting around that.
This isn’t good or bad; it just is.
“Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:—”This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
”
In other words, the Earth keeps spinning. You can do whatever you want right now – smartly or foolishly – and the Earth will spin just the same tomorrow. Until the day you die, you’ll wake up and the day will pass just the same.
And again, for the foreseeable future, this will remain true. Anything you want to do requires movement, and you’ll do that as everything else is moving. The totality of what you’ll do
in life is the set of movements you make, just as everything else is moving.
***
SIMPLE GUIDANCE WITH SOME OUTSIZED IMPACT
This series will gradually get more intense – we’ll do some very practical math; we’ll discuss the very difficult challenge of modifying one’s of behavior.
I wanted to start this first chapter easily enough before we get into the harder parts.
Some simple guidance, then –
1. Recognize time as movement.
2. Recognize the “supply of time” is fixed.
3. Cease bad language and thinking patterns from otherwise.
Next chapter, we’ll stay with Bennett and drill deep into how to reclaim lost hours so we can use them more profitably.
For this chapter, I want to leave you with a very simple piece of guidance:
Stop saying you don’t have enough time to do things.
As Bennett says, genius is not rewarded with even one extra hour per week, and the biggest knave in the world does not have hours taken from him.
We can use measurement units – hours, days, weeks, etc – to help us understand time as it passes.
But time, as we understand it, is just the Earth spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun. It’s movement.
The question becomes, what movements you’ll make in a given week.
I genuinely believe that saying “I don’t have enough time” is a crippling thing, mentally and verbally. It’s easy to do and very common in our culture, but the Earth spins and orbits at the same speed for you as it does for everyone else.
Your needs in terms of sleep, your levels of health and energy – these vary, and we’ll talk about that coming forward.
I’d like to suggest you think and meditate on the concept of time as movement
. The Earth is spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun. Everything is moving.
Meanwhile, you get to make your movements, large and small, during these time periods.
It’s fine to say you “won’t get to something” this week, you have other priorities, you’ll be doing something else.
But saying you “don’t have time” – as small of a thing as this might seem – I contend that’s disempowering, limiting, and makes a person less effective.
We’ll drill deeper into the mechanics of this over the next few chapters, but for now, stop saying you don’t have enough time. You have exactly as much time as everyone else.